Lifeline

As they left it behind, Clancy wondered if he should let some of his people work on the mass launcher, just for something to do. They might find it interesting—heck, he might even be interested himself.

He scanned the horizon, which always felt too close, with the Moon’s radius being only a third of the Earth’s. It all seemed wrong when it looked like you could throw a rock over the edge of the world. And because the horizon was so close, surface detail seemed to leap out at him, even at the guidance system’s cautious speed.

A light blinked on the console. “This is it,” he announced. “Shen, I’ve got it about two hundred yards in front of us.”

“Can’t see a thing but shadows,” she answered.

“This is it. I remember.”

Three days before, Clancy had pulled Duncan McLaris out of the Miranda’s wreckage. He had helped to chisel away Stephanie Garland’s mangled and frozen-hard corpse from the cockpit. He had retrieved the body of McLaris’s daughter inside her overlarge space suit.

It had been just dumb luck that the rovers had found the crashed shuttle-tug as soon as they had—in time to save McLaris before his own air ran out. Out on the broad and jumbled lunar surface, with its incredible shadows and too-bright sunlight, finding anything so small was difficult.

He saw a glint of reflected sunlight out of the corner of his eye and manually steered to the right. The six-pack bounced, jarring everyone in their seats as they made a straight line for the site. Shen followed in her rover.

When they grew close enough, Clancy flicked on a battery of flood lamps. The ruins of the Miranda stood like a haunted house in the rocky desolation.

Clancy spoke into the comm-link. “All right, everybody. Careful. I don’t want to have to explain any stupid accidents to Tomkins. Homann, you and Wooster spiral out from the wreckage and comb the surface. Keep going until you’re about a hundred yards away—I want to make sure we don’t miss anything.”

Who knows what we’ll need if Clavius Base is going to survive?

Clancy slowed the rover to a halt several yards in front of the shuttle-tug. Twisted metal rose from the dusty lunar surface. Pencil-thin beams of graphite composite jutted from the craft, balanced weirdly in the low gravity. Crushed and shattered crystal covered a large patch on the ground, along with remnants of viewports, astrogator lenses, and infrared sensing equipment. Smears of light from the rover vehicles, along with glare from the Sun and draping pools of black shadows, made the scene look like an overexposed photograph.

Moving stiffly in his suit, Clancy climbed down from the six-pack and jumped the last few feet to the ground. He hit the crumbly surface and bounced another step toward the Miranda. The others moved after him like extras in some absurd water ballet.

Homann and Wooster bounded away from the six-pack with recklessly long strides. The Lunatics constantly nagged the engineering crew about the hazards of low-gravity jumping—how even with the lower gravity, they still had a full amount of inertia to deal with. All the workers had seen videos of what happened when faceplates cracked: burst eyeballs, ruptured blood vessels, the dark brown powder of blood streaming out of nostrils and ears, boiling and freezing at the same time, and the awful mummy-like desiccation that set in before an hour passed.

But good people got tired of incessant warnings—safety was their own responsibility, and in the isolation at L-4, they knew the dangers of horseplay. They didn’t need a mother hen.

Homann jumped too far, let out a distressed yelp at the apex of his flight, and landed unsteadily. A few Arabic expletives sputtered across the open comm-link channel, but he recovered himself. With a smile, Clancy noticed that the two men began to move about more carefully, spiraling away from the crashed shuttle-tug.

Clancy stood in front of the wreckage. The tug’s outer hull had been split by the stress of the crash and twisted into three main sections. Clancy stared at it, imagined the shuttle the way it had been, picturing how all the pieces fit together. He rebuilt it in his mind, reconstructing the accident in reverse.

“Shen, take your team and start peeling everything off the outer structure. Some of the ceramic skin plates might be worthwhile, and the precision interlocks are more sophisticated than anything we can make here. Be sure to get the circuit boards in the navigation computers. Let me duck inside and make sure the structure’ll hold up before you guys follow.”

“Yes, sir.” Shen’s usual flippant comeback seemed to have been quelled by the sight of the mangled vessel. She had not been part of the initial rescue team.

Clancy picked his way through the ragged opening where he had found McLaris. He placed his hands on the jagged metal edge, careful not to damage his suit, then lifted himself into the craft.